Well, ugh. I’ve been living here since January 1st (SO spends about 2 days/week here but lives most of the week in Indiana, PA…he moves in full-time next Friday though) and this place is just. too. small. It’s so shitty. The floors are warped making it impossible to put certain furniture in certain places. Hardly any of the outlets are GFI. There is only one closet, and its sliding doors are too big for it so the middle 2′ are impossible to access. The basement is so gross looking that I refuse to go in it, making it useless for storage. But really, the pièce de résistance is the utter infestation of highly active house centipedes that has sprung up ever since the weather got warm. I see at LEAST one every day, most of which are small enough that I can comfortably vacuum up. But still, it’s annoying, gross, and gives me a jolt every time, and sometimes there are bigger ones that cause more stress.

…continued 2 hours later:

You will never believe this. Literally as I was writing that post I leaned over my bed to see the most monstrous, huge, disgusting house centipede in the world. It literally stood about 1.5″ tall and 4″ long. I SCREAMED at the top of my lungs and ran to the kitchen and hyperventilated on the phone to SO. He suggests I call our only Pittsburgh friend to come kill it for me. So I do. He says he can come up to help. So I spend the next 20 minutes frozen on the spot in my kitchen, when what do I see but ANOTHER. FREAKING. CENTIPEDE on the floor in there.

Friend finally arrives and we do not find the big one anywhere. I give him an empty wrapping paper tube to poke stuff with, and he literally pokes at every single thing in my bedroom and living room (the only 2 real rooms in the apartment), he moves my bed, tears the covers down, goes through the closet, behind the TV, under the couch, in the bathroom, in the toilet/toilet bowl, under the sink, and even all the way down into the basement…nothing.

But get this…while I’m standing there watching him poke at stuff, ANOTHER ONE crawls in between my feet. And I know these are all different ones because they’re all different colors…some are red, some are grey, some are black. That’s 5 I’ve seen just today (there was one in the bedroom this morning that I did vacuum up because it was small, and one in the living room earlier that night that I lost sight of before I could take care of it.)

Ugh. So now I’m spending the night on the same friend’s couch and I’m probably going to couch surf the rest of the week until SO gets here. And, after only 4 months in this place, 4 months which were spent pouring money and time and sweat and effort into fixing this place up because we thought it was going to be our long-term home…we’re going to move again. I know that every house/apartment is going to have bugs, centipedes included, but the amount of them in this house is just absolutely ridiculous.

Which was the original point of this rant…Pittsburgh bees, HOW the heck do you find cheap apartments that don’t suck around here? All we want is a 1br + den or 2br apartment with a dishwasher and on-site laundry, preferably utilities included OR cheap rent without utilities (our budget is ilke $750/mo TOPS including utilities). We have no pets or kids. And yet everything on Craigslist under those parameters are complete, utter shitholes, or in Homewood/Braddock/Wilkinsburg/etc. And then when we do find that miracle goldmine Craigslist post, by the time we respond to it (even like 1hr after it was posted) it’s already taken.

Help us please…we are desperate. I don’t feel safe or comfortable in that house anymore and it’s to the point where I absolutely dread waking up in the morning, I can’t relax anywhere there, and I take as long as possible to walk home from work so that it’s less time I have to spend there. I have not felt relaxed in weeks because I’m constantly looking all around me to check for bugs.

Ew! Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry your apt turned out crappy. I’m not a PA bee, so I can’t help you there, but I have heard that centipedes don’t generally ‘infest’ an area, there are only a few (usually). I’d google a few ways to get rid of them (dehumidifiers, keep all food up and sealed away, trap them with sticky traps or certain powders, etc). Hopefully if you wipe out the few you’ve seen they’ll be gone for good.

But I sure as heck don’t blame you for not wanting to be around them, I’m disgusted by the little half inch silverfish we get here, I can’t imagine what I’d do if I saw a 4″ bug!!!

EWW EWW EWW. I’m so sorry about that!! I get box-elder beetles all over my apartment and that’s bad enough.. I think I’d jump out of my skin if I saw a centipede. Definitely call a pest control service.. or your landlord! That’s terrible.

@noritake22: The thing with house centipedes is that there’s not really any good way to exterminate them. They’re like stink bugs kinda (except far more disgusting!) in the way that you can’t call an exterminator to get rid of them. At least no exterminator I’ve ever heard of…

@indibee: I think our house might be the exception to that “usually” LOL. Lucky us. Because seriously at least the past month I’ve been seeing at least one every single day, probably more like 2 or 3 some days, so that’s at least 30 bugs I’ve seen in as many days. Insanity. My dad’s house had kind of a lot of them too but even his house would be like one per month or so. SO’s parents’ house is the same way…once in a blue moon. And my old apartment (which happens to be the place I’m staying at tonight…funny how that worked out) I saw 2 the entire 16 months I lived here. I will have to find a way to disable images and search for some way to get rid of them (or go with noritake’s suggestion of an exterminator/pest control, if I find one that exists) but I’ve been afraid to because I don’t want to see pictures of them on the pages haha.

@Mrs. Puffin: It’s especially bad now that Google puts image search results right on the main search page, and they’re not put on the page as regular images so telling Firefox to not load images doesn’t block them! And a lot of websites use things other than the standard <img> tag to put up their images as well…definitely not something I want to risk!! I’ll have to get my not-afraid-of-bugs friend to research for me…

@indibee: Ahaha gross. Related story!: A coupe weeks ago I walked into my bathroom after having just been in there a few minutes prior and found a gigantic centipede smushed into my floor. Like I had stepped on it the previous time I’d gone in and not even noticed it. THANK GOODNESS I was wearing shoes, aaahhhbllblllagagllghlblg it makes me gag just thinking about what if I wasn’t. And that bug is still on my floor to this day, I put a little rug over it but SO doesn’t want to clean it up and I definitely won’t…so there it will stay until we move, I guess.

We have these in our house. I had NEVER seen one before Fiance and I moved into our place. They are so disgusting. One usually surprises me in one of the sinks or bathtubs and sometimes on the ceiling (that is THE WORST). They apparently eat spiders, which would be good if they weren’t so gross. I’d rather see a spider.

awww eww… i looked up what to do… get a dehumidifier… they like moist damp places so if its nice and dry they prolly wont want to hang out with you anymore 🙂 then get rid of any house plants, or wood or leaf piles around your house. next if you are still seeing them try diatomaceous earth…. its basically finely crushed sea shells… but the centipedes eat it and it drys them up and tears up their insides… killing them (yay!)…. this stuff is pretty much all natural so its fine to use everywhere in the house and then you can just vacuum it up 🙂 hope this helps! 🙂

@Kant: Lol, ew! I wonder if you’ll be able to pull that rug up when you leave or if it’ll be glued to the floor.

I always skeeve out when I see a cricket or a beetle, but then I laugh – when we were little (I was about 8, my sister around 4ish) she called me outside sooooo proud of herself. I asked her what the big deal was, she’s like ‘look, I figured out how to kill them, just step on them until you feel the *C R U N C H*. (brief intermission while ya puke in your mouth a little) So now, even though they still just freak me out, I think of my goober little sister and her proud ‘discovery.’ O.o

A little off topic but when I was a teenager my bedroom was in the basement. We had some gross centepedes down there sometimes. Once when I was sleeping I woke up to something tickling my face/me smashing something on my face. I instantly woke all the way up and ran to the bathroom mirror, to find a huge smashed centepede stuck to my cheek. I screamed and cried for a long time. It was a very unpleasant experience. I feel your pain. Centepedes are so freaking gross and scary.

I had to comment because *cringe* I am up and afraid to sleep because of “it”. The spider that not only crawled across my computer screen but fell in between the bed and wall. I know the minute I fall asleep it’s going to crawl back up here. I’m laying here freaking out every time my hair touches my back. I’m half tempted to wake up the sleeping SO so I can rip the bed from the wall, find it, and kill it.

So what do I do to keep my mind off it, come on here. First post I clicked on was yours and I must say, you have so much more courage than me. In your situation I would be standing on a couch with a can of hairspray (I don’t have any bug killer) weeping like a small mentally disturbed child. I saw the spider and screamed and started flailing like my fingernails were on fire. “It” is going down. It may not be tonight, or tomorrow, but it’s on….